Insight

How Dedicated Managed Accounts Achieve Strategic Business Goals

July 24, 2025

The significant flexibility offered by Dedicated Managed Accounts (DMAs) makes these structures uniquely suited to achieve a wide range of business objectives.

During our recent Thought Leadership Summit in New York, Innocap CEO François Rivard discussed different strategic uses of DMAs in an engaging conversation with Richard Macklem, Portfolio Manager, CPP Investments, Justin Maistrow, Chief Investment Officer, Employee Retirement System of Rhode Island and Scott Radke, Chief Executive Officer, New Holland Capital, LLC.

Throughout the conversation, it became clear that DMAs help achieve specific goals including:

Grow and work with more asset managers without needing to increase resources.

By partnering with Innocap, allocators can leverage our full suite of capabilities including legal, investment, risk and operational expertise, fund hosting capabilities for emerging managers, extensive technology and data services, as well as our relationships with and connections to third parties to utilize DMAs without adding internal resources. This creates operational efficiency that allows the allocator to onboard even the earliest stage managers as they can rely on Innocap to provide the necessary infrastructure.

With DMAs, in-house experts can focus on developing manager relationships and managing the portfolio while Innocap handles the operational management and oversight of the DMA supporting both in-house teams and external managers.

Manage risk amid changing market conditions.

DMAs are the natural choice for a portfolio seeking to manage risk and offset liabilities with stable growth and income. Hedge funds are used to mitigate risk, and the DMA structure provides exceptional customization and transparency – crucial to managing the strategy, expectations and outcomes.

With Innocap’s risk reporting, position-level information and daily liquidity data, the portfolio can be rebalanced quickly as market conditions change. DMAs are a nimble structure, making it easier to maintain a healthy balance as allocators can respond quickly and lock in gains when risk assets are selling off.

Optimize with a multi-strategy approach.

DMAs make it easy to create and manage a diversified pool of managers that results in a multi-manager market-neutral hedge fund portfolio. The allocator can focus on portfolio optimization, risk reduction and alpha generation with the flexibility to dynamically adjust the portfolio in volatile markets.

The data and transparency provided by Innocap gives the allocator a clear view of concentration risk, while the flexibility of the DMA structure allows them to increase volatility for certain managers, reduce others, or use a central book to magnify trade volume and create opportunity. Cross-margining and notional funding allows the allocator amplify risk efficiency and dynamically deploy capital.

Despite the varied objectives for establishing a DMA, the panelists agreed on four core characteristics that make the structure so appealing and effective: simplified management, flexibility, capital efficiency, and resource optimization.

  1. Using an infrastructure and platform provider that supports growth and handles platform implementation expands the allocator’s operational capacity and reduces risk.
  2. Having the flexibility to negotiate custom terms and fees gives the allocator and managers more control over strategies and outcomes.
  3. Netting transactions, cross-margining, and notional funding allows the allocator to more efficiently deploy capital and prevents the need to “over-fund” investments.
  4. Having the right partner allows an allocator to focus on managing and growing the portfolio without having to grow their operational footprint and expense base.

As the panel made clear, Innocap’s approach to implementation and servicing a DMA platform is extremely flexible and offers substantial benefits across a wide variety of use cases.